Western Digital My book Essential Edition failure

[terence_patrick]

I've been looking at this: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/

[Plekto]

External 3.5 inch drives are junk.  Not because the drives are, but because of the heat and the lack of ventilation.   Unless it's a 5200rpm drive(WD GP or similar) and has a fan in it, it will fail fairly quickly.   One solution is to run laptop drives.  They generate low enough heat to work in an enclosure.  Smaller, too.

The other and better solution for permanent storage is a SSD.  SSDs only fail on writing and never on reading(aside from a massive physical problem), plus are stable for potentially decades.  They aren't good at all for daily use, but for storage, they are without a doubt the best option on the market right now(too bad they aren't marketed as such, though)

For smaller amounts of data, a USB thumb drive also works, since it is the same technology.

[walter.sk]

I have had several 500GB external drives fail, and all of them were able to continue working after I removed them from their enclosures and put them into new enclosures.  In each case the electronics of the interface had failed.

My current problem is with a Seagate 500gb Barracuda internal hard drive that came with my Dell XPS 730 computer I bought in November, 2008.  There had been no signs of drive failure (noises, messages, clicks, etc).  One day last week I shut down the computer.  When I turned everything on later that day, I got a message indicating there was no boot device.  Going into the BIOS setup I saw that the computer was not recognizing the presence of the drive.  Dell sent a replacement drive, but there was data on the original drive that was a victim to "good intentions to back it up this week."   My bad, of course.

Ironically, I received a letter and CD in the mail from Dell that same day with a firmware/driver upgrade from Seagate, indicating that there was an "industry-wide" problem with that drive, and the upgrade would prevent the problem.  Four days too late for me.

I tried putting the drive in an external enclosure, SATA-USB, but my other computer would not recognize it.  It is now in the hands of the Geek Squad at Best Buy, on the advice of several friends who had good results with data recovery from them at a decent price.

Question:  several people in this thread have mentioned rescue software, but how would that work if the computer cannot find the drive?

[Plekto]

Most of the time a drive has that sort of issue, it's the controller card that is dead/having issues.  Usually you can swap the board from an identical drive and manage at least a data recovery.  If you have a second drive like that, it might be worth trying.  Note - it will not keep the bad sector data the same, so it's dangerous to use the thing other than to read the data off/recover it.